He got into technology in 1961 Don Hollis now does consulting, lots of pro bono

Name: Don Hollis

Title: President

Company: DRH Strategic Consulting helps technology and financialservices companies overcome strategic problems

Passion: Collecting Olympic pins

Don Hollis didn't start off as a tech guy. But back then almostnobody did.

An accountant by training, Hollis strayed into computers in 1961,when a computer with 10K of memory (compared to 128,000K today)filled a room, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and ran onthousands of little punch cards. After 13 years working on financialtechnology systems with Cleveland paint conglomerate Glidden and 10years with Chase Manhattan Bank, Hollis found his way to FirstChicago, the precedessor to Bank One.

Hollis retired as executive vice president in 1996, and thesedays, he divides his time between traveling with his family, advisingtechnology- and financial services-related companies, and extensivepro bono work.

Q. How did you become involved with technology so early?

A. When I graduated from Kent State with an accounting degree, Ihad a choice between becoming a graduate assistant at the Universityof Pittsburgh or entering a corporate training program. Since I hadjust gotten married and my wife was pregnant, I decided I needed toget a real job.

Glidden was the only offer I had that fit that need. Their SanFrancisco office was recently acquired, and the integration wasn'tgoing well. For example, they hadn't even done any invoicing for sixmonths because they didn't have the staff. I worked 20 hours a day,and brought in an outside computing contractor to get caught up. Ihad no exposure to technology before that.

Q. When did you really begin to sink your teeth into it?

A. The company started down the road to computing within the year,and needed someone to take care of the West Coast. Since I was theonly person who knew anything about the equipment, the CFO put me incharge. RCA [then a mainframe maker] took me to school and basicallygave me a pre-Computer Science 101 crash course.

I found the building, hired the people, trained the punchcardoperators, built the data center, and wrote the specs for all theaccounting applications for all our businesses on the West Coast. Wedistributed them to programmers all over the country. It was really aspectacular operation for 1961.

Q. How did that affect your career?

A. It wasn't long thereafter that I got promoted to head ofcorporate systems at Cleveland headquarters. So that's really how Igot started in technology. It wasn't any conscious long-range planwhere I identified this huge potential and found a way to get there.It just was necessary to solve a problem. In effect, it found me.

Q. What did you do at First Chicago?

A. I came in as senior vice president of management informationsystems, the same title I had at Chase. After a few years, I tookover the information technology department, where I was responsiblefor the whole commercial side of the business. The bank was 70percent commercial back then, and we provided all thetelecommunications and data processing infrastructure.

My job was so complex they had to break it up into five jobs whenI retired in 1996 because it wasn't a natural aggregation.

Q. What's the biggest technology problem in banking?

A. We need to move towards better authentication technology. ...We should be absolutely identifying who is giving a command andmaking a request. There is no technology constraint.

Dave Lundy is president of DL Strategies, a Chicago-basedstrategic communications firm. He can be reached atdsl@dlstrategies.com